A Liberian woman who refuses to be silent on female genital mutilation

The words “honour killing” were virtually unknown in mainstream Canadian society until five years ago, when 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez was strangled to death by her brother in their Mississauga, Ont., home. As with the Shafia family murders a year and a half later, the motivating factor was a pathologically violent, culturally-rooted drive to enforce conservative sexual norms on girls accused of “dishonouring” their families through immodest or rebellious behaviour.

But there is another form of honour-based violence against women that gets less attention — but which arguably results in a higher death toll: female genital mutilation (FGM), i.e. the removal of a girl’s or woman’s external female genitalia. Unlike with male circumcision (for which the medical evidence is mixed), there is no health-based argument for FGM.

While FGM is performed in many different societies in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the professed justification is usually the same: Women who are “uncut” enjoy the sex act too much. By depriving them of the ability to feel sexual pleasure, the traditional theory goes, you guarantee that they will remain chaste and faithful to their husbands.

It is a repellant, painful and demeaning practice — a badge of the least developed and enlightened cultures on the face of the planet. And it is murderous, too. The females who endure FGM (some are mere toddlers) typically are butchered by a “traditional” cutter — an old woman wielding a filthy knife. Many African girls, in particular, are infected with life-threatening diseases during the process.

“Other girls, they simply bleed to death,” says Mae Azango, a Liberian journalist who has become internationally renowned (as well as infamous among traditionalists in her own country) for exposing the horrors of FGM as it is practiced in the Liberian outback. “But when this happens, they just blame it on ‘witchcraft.’”

In Liberia (as well as neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone), many of the women are “cut” in collective rural ceremonies according to the rites of a cult-like secret society known as the Sande. “The woman who cuts you — she might cut 25 girls with the same knife,” says Azango, picking up a butter knife and waving it around for emphasis as we have breakfast together at a midtown Toronto restaurant.

Here in the West, naive health-food faddists like to romanticize the “traditional” ways of African tribes. A conversation with Azango cures that pretty quick.

“These instruments aren’t sterilized,” she tells me, as I push aside what remains of my breakfast. “There’s no anesthetic. If you resist, they knock you to the ground, a bunch of women hold you down, and another cuts off your clitoris while you scream. And then to heal you, they just mash a bunch of herbs into the affected area. Who knows what kind of insects are crawling over that stuff?”

Even for survivors, the tragedy of FGM lasts a lifetime. Azango notes that some women who leave the Liberian bush for the big city, or for other countries, have trouble finding a mate, because many modern men don’t want to be with a cut woman. “Nobody wants to make love to a zombie,” is how she summarizes it bluntly.

On Wednesday, Azango will be honoured at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto, where she will receive the 2012 International Press Freedom Award from the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. The story of why she won that award goes a long way to explain why FGM is still epidemic in West African societies.

Her drama began on International Women’s Day, March 8, when she published an unusually detailed article about the deadly consequences of FGM in her newspaper, Front Page Africa.

While FGM is widespread in Liberia, discussion of it is taboo: Like any secret society, the Sande prohibit inductees from discussing initiation rites, clitorectomies included. After Azango’s article was published, she began receiving threats: People calling up, or even coming to her door, telling her they’d drag her to the countryside for her own “initiation.” One group of Sande women even came looking for Azango’s 9-year-old daughter.

Liberian traditionalists have accused Azango of “selling out” to Western activists — spilling the dirty secrets of FGM to an international audience. But Azango makes no apologies for working with whites. In many cases, she says, they’re the only people she can trust: Even in the relatively sophisticated environs of Monrovia, one never knows which female colleague has been initiated into the Sande and which has not. Since Sande initiates have a duty to report on women who divulge cult secrets, exchanging anti-FGM confidences with a fellow black woman can be dangerous, and even deadly.

The government of Liberia nominally opposes FGM. But Azango complains that they do little about it. “All of the people who say they’re doing something to help, they just sit around Monrovia in air-conditioned offices, talking about the problem,” she complains to me. Most city-dwellers already are educated about the risks of FGM: It is the people in the countryside, the ones who send their daughters to Sande camps and schools (where FGM is, literally, a graduation requirement), who need to be educated.

“We are talking about places where no one has even seen a car,” she adds. “The people have no education. If you are a child, your mother and your grandmother are telling you that you need to be cut. You don’t know any better.”

Female literacy and education levels tend to correlate strongly with human development in all societies. And that is certainly the case with Liberia, where the most effective advocates against FGM are well-schooled urban women such as Azango.

“My father wanted to send me to the Sande,” Azango says. “But my mother, who went to college, she said no. And that is what saved me.”

Now, her journalistic mission is to help educate and empower other women to make the same choice for their children. Given the toll of misery and death caused by FGM, it’s hard to think of a more worthy goal — or a more fitting honoree at the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression annual gala tomorrow night.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @jonkay.